Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  And yet my folks had been so chuffed when I’d passed the Eleven Plus. Various options were discussed. Even stage school was mooted. The Old Man had been consulted. He’d suggested I try for the City of London School for Girls, a prestigious school, founded in the late 1800s. It would have meant passing a stiff exam for a scholarship, but I didn’t pass the initial interview. So they plumped for sending me to another well-regarded school, Skinners’, a twenty-minute bus ride up through Stoke Newington to Stamford Hill.

  ‘The Hill’ was considerably posher than our part of the world. It boasted a park, some smart shops and many big Victorian houses. Then, as now, there were many Jewish families living there. And my parents, somewhat naively, believed that because Skinners’ had a high proportion of Jewish pupils – over half the total population of my year – this was bound to be ‘better’ for my education.

  How wrong can you be? The exposure to more Jewish pupils meant rubbing shoulders with girls who were from wealthier backgrounds, had travelled, were more sophisticated and were, in some cases, quite precocious. Despite our comparative affluence at home, until then, my primary-school buddies had been girls from working-class families, quite different to some of the posher Skinners’ girls who were already well into rock’n’roll and boy chasing.

  My two main primary school chums, Sandra Holland and Kathy Shilling, lived in shabby rented houses off the Kingsland Road, their parents’ lives were modest, respectable – but they were quite unworldly. And our joint exploits – making a bonfire night Guy and standing on the corner of Kingsland Road asking passers-by for pennies (a challenge I relished, truth to tell, despite my parents’ horror that I was out on the street ‘begging’) – were distinctly childish.

  Some of these new Skinners’ classmates seemed daring to me, already wearing nylons and lipstick out of school; one or two even had boyfriends a few years older than them. These girls’ influence made a big impression on me. And this, combined with the fact that we were among the first group of teenagers to emerge as post-war teenagers with consumerist leanings, developing our own tastes and clothes, rather than remaining just younger, drab versions of our parents until adulthood, meant I was never going to take education seriously.

  At home, my parents’ ambitions for me beyond getting into Skinners’ and forking out for the nice red-and-grey uniform (which could only be purchased from Kinch & Lack, a shop specialising in school uniforms near Victoria Station) were distinctly hazy.

  ‘Is fifty quid enough? queried Ginger, peeling off the notes as if they were playing cards to purchase the new uniform. They’d both left school at fourteen, my mum an avowed duffer who had relied on her elder siblings to help crib her homework. For them, passing the exam was a huge achievement in itself. Yet the whole point of the Eleven Plus was for bright working-class kids to be streamed, a big step on a path that could, if they worked really hard, lead to university and a real chance in life for the ordinary, less privileged child.

  But in my case, as the actress Carrie Fisher once said: great anecdote, bad reality. With my dad permanently sloshed most nights and my mum vainly trying to keep a fragile peace between us – open warfare between me and Ginger really got going when I hit my teens – they just weren’t likely to put all their efforts into helping me understand that this was A Big Opportunity. Their own ‘live for now’ horizons were too limited. And I was a temperamental child, hard to handle, prone to outbursts. Moreover, I was reasonably pretty, quite slim, with no major defects. They blithely assumed I’d probably be married by the time I passed my teens.

  So there you have some idea why the great post-war social experiment that was the Eleven Plus didn’t work out for the education of one kid from Hackney.

  Though you must never discount the distraction of the powerful cultural influences creeping up on us all, especially Elvis, whose voice, sexual charisma and astonishing good looks had us nudging hysteria at the Regent cinema on the Hill when Love Me Tender, Elvis’ first movie, lit up the screen. We’d scream to order every time he curled his lip or did his bump ’n’ grind routine. Though on reflection, the majority of us, still barely adults, didn’t really have a clue exactly why he turned us on so much.

  CHAPTER 18

  ONE NIGHT OF SHAME

  By the end of that first year I’d already teamed up with a few of the more worldly Skinners’ girls; many of them travelled on my bus route home. There were the sisters, Sylvie and Barbara, just eighteen months apart, one cheerful and sunny, the other sullen and brooding. Their parents were rumoured to have separated, something so rare and shocking then that the sisters never talked about it openly.

  Sylvie was friendly, gregarious and tried really hard in class, though she never got great marks, no matter how assiduously she worked. Barbara, the older sister, was morose, scruffy, in a permanent sulk, though with a cutting wit and, underneath the unappealing exterior, extremely bright: she’d get good marks without much study. Linda, Heather and Rosalind made up their gang, a tight little trio already plotting their way to courtship and marriage to local boys met at the nearby Stamford Hill Club, a social meeting place for young Jewish kids. Heather, with huge eyes and blonde hair, already had an older steady beau, Mike. I latched on to these girls partly because they were more knowing and worldly, partly for good company on the bus. But I wasn’t consistently part of their group, perhaps because I sensed I didn’t have a real affinity with them. Their focus, even at that early stage, was snaring a Jewish husband, which to me seemed a bit remote – and short-sighted. And before long, I’d bonded with another Hackney girl in my year who eventually became my best friend, Larraine, widely known as Lolly, thanks to a hit Chordettes song of ’58 called ‘Lollipop’, which went ‘Lollipop, Lollipop, ooh Lolli, Lolli, Lolli’, an embarrassment for her when other kids burst into song and chanted it. But while the song came and went in the charts, the nickname stuck.

  We were quite different too but the bonds grew from our shared interests, mainly books, clothes and Elvis records, with a growing interest in the opposite sex, though like me, Lolly hadn’t yet reached the actual boyfriend stage.

  She was the eldest of three kids, growing up on a council estate. Her dad Monty was a London cabbie, something that proved to be a bit of a bonus later on when we started hanging around clubs and coffee houses in the West End. In appearance, we were opposite: she dark-haired, tiny and exotic looking, me, taller, fair-skinned and freckled. There were other differences. Lolly firmly believed my mum to be ‘posh’ because she spoke nicely and dressed like a movie star, while Larraine’s mum Fay, equally attractive, was very earthy, quite loud with a distinct East End Jewish twang.

  This belief that somehow I had a more upmarket status was confirmed for Lolly the afternoon she first came round to our flat and my mum offered her a drink, instant coffee, spooned out from a tin of Nescafé.

  My new friend had never seen this kind of coffee before.

  ‘Ooh, thanks Mrs Hyams,’ she said, taking the cup and very much impressed by the novelty of something different.

  ‘We only have Camp coffee at home, this is lovely.’ Molly looked quizzical: she’d heard of Camp, knew it was much cheaper – but in our world of cash bribes and never-never payments, who would think of actually buying it?

  (Camp Coffee was a thick brown liquid made out of water, sugar, chicory essence and a little bit of coffee essence, a popular inexpensive coffee substitute in the austerity years, with its distinctive bottle showing a Scottish and a Sikh soldier sitting by a tent. It’s still around now: people use it in baking to give a coffee flavour.)

  The next day, Lolly told me she thought I had a lot more going for me than she did. ‘Your mum’s so posh. She’s really ladylike. And you don’t live on a council estate, like us,’ she reminded me.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s a dump,’ was my retort.

  ‘And my mum’s not really posh. She’s just got lots of nice clothes.’

  We differed in one other respect: Lolly and her siblings ado
red both their parents, yet I had an open aversion to my dad whose ridiculous possessiveness had started to increase as I got older, though I kept fairly quiet about my embarrassment about his drinking. Lolly couldn’t do exactly what she liked. But with two other children in their flat, she had slightly more freedom than me.

  I loved the very different environment in their noisily cheerful home. With a plump, boisterous ten-year-old brother, Keith, and a quieter younger sister, Adrienne, with whom she shared a bedroom, their three-bedroom council flat near Mare Street was bigger and livelier, with family members popping in and out all the time. It was nothing like my world, without visitors or space, sticking fast to my books and my damp little room facing the noisy timberyard when my dad was around, permanently avoiding him and only feeling happy to move around the flat when he wasn’t there.

  So I spent quite a lot of after-school time at Lolly’s, ostensibly doing ‘homework’ (which initially involved minimal effort and plunged to near zero within a year or so) but mainly listening to Elvis on her much-prized green leatherette Dansette record player, purchased by her dad in Mare Street, or swapping passages or poems from books we’d liked, laboriously copying them down by hand, then cutting out each passage and sticking it into a scrapbook. We repeated the process with our treasured Elvis pictures. Magazine photos were starting to appear of him in various guises, on stage in a velvet shirt, reaching out to his fans, bare-chested, looking moodily into the distance.

  Some of these photos went onto our bedroom walls, despite parental objection, but most went into the precious scrapbooks. And it was only Elvis. We didn’t have much choice – Frankie Laine, anyone? – but we weren’t fickle. No one else but Elvis really got a look in.

  The Hill had a few attractions for soppy teenage girls in search of laughs and adventure. It had an amusement arcade – known as ‘the schtip’ – where older boys hung out and the E & A bar, a salt beef bar where we could buy huge pickled cucumbers to munch on as we walked around after school, giggling with our gaggle of cronies before getting on the bus, climbing upstairs and creating havoc.

  Skinners’ rules were strict: no eating outside the school premises or on the street, no venturing into the local shops. A few obedient swots obeyed but most of us ignored this. Though it was easy to spot Skinners’ girls because of the uniform, envied throughout the area: a very slick red-and-black striped blazer, red stripey cotton blouse tucked into a grey wool skirt, grey or black socks, Mary Jane one-strap shoes or lace-ups. In winter we wore a grey V-neck jumper with a red border over the blouse. There was also a nasty grey beret, usually shoved in my pocket, and a grey belted mac – which didn’t get worn much. At other secondary schools, like Laura Place in nearby Clapton, the uniforms were grim: everything brown. How many teenage girls want to wear brown knickers?

  But while I already had an awareness of clothes and what they could do for you, mainly thanks to my mum, when it came to boys, I was nowhere – no brothers, male cousins, other than Anthony who didn’t count, or even girlfriends with brothers. And, since I’d gone to an all-girls primary, boys remained a huge mystery. Yet some of the girls in my class had already started to experience those first ever kisses and sexual fumbles – and talked about it openly.

  Naturally, this troubled me greatly. Was there something wrong with me? And how did you behave around boys? I had no idea. Lolly and I would discuss the boys we liked the look of endlessly. But getting up close and personal with them was another thing. OK, you’d ‘know’ boys locally, their names, where they lived, who their friends were, where they hung around – the same places as us, mainly in and around the local Jewish club near the Hill or around the E & A bar, but you didn’t exactly go beyond smiles, the occasional nod hello or ‘look’.

  Only if a boy came up to you at a local club dance – there were no discos then – and asked you to dance could you start to communicate in any way. The breakthrough point, of course, was if they asked to see you home. But the rule was you waited for them to ask. Girls didn’t even dance together; it was a time of wait and he will come. Eventually. There were things like table tennis at the Jewish club that had ice-breaking potential. But, of course, I eschewed anything remotely sporty. So I wasn’t going to get anywhere there.

  In that first year at Skinners’, I had another big hang-up: I didn’t yet need to wear a bra. Oh, the shame. Not having tits was a serious black mark against me, reducing the possibilities of attracting a boy. Lolly already wore a bra. But I still had nothing to speak of up top. So with a bit of encouragement from Lolly, I decided to cheat. Without my mum knowing, I went into Dudleys, the big department store on the corner of Kingsland Road, and artfully purchased a pair of ‘falsies’ with my pocket money, two useful bits of foam padding which, when deployed under a jumper, would give the illusion of a comely shape.

  It might have been a good idea to have actually worn them. Because there was one unforgettable winter’s night at the Stamford Hill club which was to go down in history as My Night of Unbelievable Shame.

  Lolly and I more or less copied each other when it came to fashion. If she had a new fully-fashioned button-through cardigan from Marks & Spencer, I’d get one too, though from a different shop because I thought M&S was too common, too many people wore it. And you couldn’t try things on. Lolly, more practical, liked the M&S convenience factor, with its returns policy on production of the receipt (they were light years ahead of all other high street retailers on this). And, in our desire to look more sophisticated, we’d both recently acquired inexpensive but quite wide heavy wicker basket bags, open at the top without any sort of fastening, so you could hook the basket onto your arm, aiming to look chic. And it was very easy to just put your hand in to fish for a purse, a mirror or, rarely in my case, a comb.

  On the night in question, I’ve popped my falsies into my basket a few days before. But as I stand there in the club, chatting to Lolly, basket on arm, cautiously eyeing the boys, I’m taken by surprise. Unexpectedly, an older boy we know by name, Roy Gordon, appears alongside us, grinning. Then he suddenly dips his hand into my basket – and, horror of horrors, out come my falsies, bundled up with an elastic band. Pay dirt! (He’d probably expected, at best, a lipstick to muck around with.)

  ‘Whoooah, whatcha, got in there!’ yells Roy in triumph, pulling off the elastic band and waving the falsies aloft for everyone in the room to see.

  ‘Give ‘em back!’ I screech, panicking like mad. But it’s far too late. A delighted Roy is now parading himself around the clubroom, stuffing the falsies under his jumper, prowling round the room in a parody of a girls’ walk.

  ‘Didn’t think you needed THESE!

  ‘Look everyone, Jacky Hyams wants to show you her tits!’

  Shame isn’t in it. I am utterly, totally mortified. Any bit of fake confidence I might pretend to have has been totally demolished. For thirty seconds, I just stand there, rooted to the spot, going redder and redder, awash with embarrassment. Lolly can’t help; she doesn’t know what to do or say either. And by now, of course, everyone around has got the joke and is laughing fit to bust, if you’ll pardon the pun. My humiliation is complete.

  Back home, I chuck the foolish falsies down the smelly chute. And after that, whenever we see Roy at the club, he smirks knowingly, makes a snide comment – ‘gotcha falsies tonight, Jack?’ – and all I can do is manage a ‘piss off’ to him before moving as far away as possible. Can’t he ever let me forget it?

  Yet within a few months everything has changed: I’ve miraculously sprouted tiny boobs. Molly helps me choose a Kayser Bondor bra in Jax, on the Kingsland Road, plus a very grown-up suspender belt to keep up my first-ever pair of stockings. (Kayser Bondor is one of the leading, much advertised underwear brands of the fifties.) OK, I still haven’t been kissed. But at long last, to my mind, I am really growing up …

  CHAPTER 19

  THE IDEAL HOME

  A summer Saturday and Molly and I are on a train, going to Leicester for a reunion of sort
s, an old friend, a woman called Edie with whom she’d worked in Oxford Street during the war.

  This is intriguing, a strange place with people we’d never seen. Or heard of, come to that. By now, early teens, I am old enough to resist attempts by my parents to get me to keep up the regular Sunday visits down the Lane to my grandparents. This causes rows, of course. I suspect my mother is sympathetic to my early rebellion but she continues to back my dad.

  ‘You’ve got to see them, it’s all about RESPECT!’ Ginger yells.

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to go there, I’m sick of going there. There’s a funny atmosphere, anyway.’

  ‘Whaddya mean by that? What “atmosphere”? What’s she talkin’ about Mol?’ says my dad, handing it over to my mum in the hope she can sort it.

  ‘I don’t know, Ging. Look Jac, they’re your grandparents. You have to go.’

  ‘NO I DON’T,’ I scream, running into my bedroom, slamming the door hard behind me. (How that door remained on its hinges is a mystery; perhaps workmanship, as is often claimed, really was better in the thirties.)

  Sometimes I win this battle, sometimes I don’t. But my rejection of anything to do with my dad is like a running sore through our lives. I can’t articulate it, it’s just there, a feeling, a sense that I need to disassociate myself with anything to do with the Lane, his life – and, of course, the boozing.

  To me, the whole package stinks. And I’m not making it up about ‘the atmosphere’. There are times when we visit the flat in Stoney Lane that you can sense a brooding tension, waiting to explode – which means my grandparents are about to have yet another major ding-dong, and they’re already locked into one of their ‘not speaking to each other’ modes. Who wanted to be around that?